Wellek Symbolism

The Term and Concept of Symbolism in Literary HistoryAuthor(s): Rene WellekSource: New Literary History, Vol. 1, No. 2, A Symposium on Periods (Winter, 1970), pp. 249-270Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468631Accessed: 07/10/2009 03:44

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The Term and Concept of Symbolism in Literary History

Rene Wellek

HE topic: the term and concept of symbolism (and symbol) is so vast that it cannot even be sketched within the limits of this paper. The word goes back to ancient Greece and had, there, a complex history which has not, I suspect,

been traced adequately in the only history of the term, Max Schle- singer's Geschichte des Symbols, published in 1912.1

What I want to discuss is something much more specific: not even symbol and symbolism in literature but the term and concept of symbolism as a period in literary history. It can, I suggest, be con-

veniently used as a general term for the literature in all Western countries following the decline of g1th-century realism and naturalism and preceding the rise of the new avant-garde movements: futurism, expressionism, surrealism, existentialism, or whatever else. How has it come about? Can such a use be justified?

We must distinguish among different problems: the history of the word need not be identical with the history of the concept as we might today formulate it. We must ask, on the one hand, what the

contemporaries meant by it, who called himself a "symbolist" or who wanted to be included in a movement called "symbolism," and on the other hand, what modern scholarship might decide about who is to be included and what characteristics of the period seem decisive. In

speaking of "symbolism" as a period-term located in history we must also think of its situation in space. Literary terms most frequently radiate from one center but do so unevenly; they seem to stop at the frontiers of some countries or cross them and languish there or, sur- prisingly, flourish more vigorously on a new soil. A geography of literary terms is needed which might attempt to account for the spread and distribution of terms by examining rival terms or accidents of biography or simply the total situation of a literature.

There seems to be a widespread agreement that the literary history

i Berlin, 1912.

of the centuries since the end of the Middle Ages can be divided into five successive periods: Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism, Romanti- cism and Realism. Among these terms Baroque is a comparative new- comer which has not been adopted everywhere, though there seems a clear need of a name for the style that reacted against the Renaissance but preceded Classicism.2 There is, however, far less agreement as to what term should be applied to the literature that followed the end of the dominance of Realism in the 188os and '9os. The term "Mod- ernism" and its variants such as the German "Die Moderne"3 have been used but have the obvious disadvantage that they can be applied to any contemporary art. Particularly in English, the term "modern" has preserved its early meaning of a contrast to classical antiquity or is used for everything that occurred since the Middle Ages. The Cam-

bridge Modern History is an obvious example. The attempts to dis- criminate between the "modern" period now belonging to the past and the "contemporaneous" seem forced, at least terminologically. "Modo," after all, means "now." "Modernism" used so broadly as to include all avant-garde art obscures the break between the symbolist period and all post-symbolist movements such as futurism, surrealism, existentialism, etc. In the East it is used as a catchall for everything disapproved as decadent, formalistic, and alienated: it has become a

pejorative term set against the glories of Socialist realism. The older terms were appealed to at the turn of the century by the-

orists and slogan writers, who either believed that these terms are ap- plicable to all literature or consciously thought of themselves as reviv-

ing the style of an older period. Some spoke of a new "classicism," particularly in France, assuming that all good art must be classical. Croce shares this view. Those who felt a kinship with the Romantic Age, mainly in Germany, spoke of "Neuromantik" appealing to Friedrich

Schlegel's dictum that all poetry is romantic. Realism also asserted its claim, mainly in Marxist contexts, in which all art is considered "realistic" or at least "a reflection of reality." I need only allude to Georg Lukacs's recent Aesthetik, in which this thesis is repeated with obsessive urgency. I have counted the phrase "Widerspiegelung der Wirklichkeit" in the first volume; it appears 1,032 times. I was too lazy or bored to count it in volume 2. All these monisms endanger meaningful schemes of literary periodization. Nor can one be satisfied with a dichotomy such as Fritz Strich's "Klassik und Romantik" which

2 See my papers "The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship" (1945) and

"Postscript" (1962) in Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), pp. 69-127. 3 Eugen Wolff, Die jiungste Literaturstrdmung und das Prinzip der Moderne

(Berlin, 1887), seems the source of this form. In 1884 Arno Holz urges "Modern sei der Poet,/ Modern von Scheitel bis zur Sohle."

250 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

THE TERM AND CONCEPT OF SYMBOLISM

leads away from period concepts into a universal typology, a simple division of the world into sheep and goats. For many years I have

argued the advantage of a multiple scheme of periods as it permits a

variety of criteria. The one criterion "realism" would divide all art into realistic and non-realistic art and thus would allow only one

approving adjective: "real" or some variant such as "true" or "life- like." A multiple scheme comes much closer to the actual variety of the process of history. Period must be conceived neither as some essence which has to be intuited as a Platonic idea nor as a mere

arbitrary linguistic label. It should be understood as a "regulative idea," as a system of norms, conventions and values which can be traced in its rise, spread and decline, in competition with preceding and following norms, conventions and values.4

"Symbolism" seems the obvious term for the dominant style which followed nineteenth-century realism. It was propounded in Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) and is assumed as a matter of course in Maurice Bowra's Heritage of Symbolism (1943). We must beware, of course, of confusing this historical form with age-old symbolism, or with the view that all art is symbolic, as language is a system of symbols. Symbolism in the sense of a use of symbols in literature is clearly omnipresent in literature of many styles, periods and civilizations. Symbols are all-pervasive in medieval literature and even the classics of realism - Tolstoy and Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens - use symbols, often prominently. I am myself guilty of arguing for the crucial role of symbol in any definition of Romanticism and I have written at length on the long German debate from Goethe to Friedrich Theodor Vischer about the meaning of the term "symbol" and its contrast to the term "allegory."5

For our purposes I want to focus on the fortunes of the concept as a term, first for a school, then as a movement, and finally as a period. The term "symbolisme" as the designation for a group of poets was first proposed by Jean Moreas, the French poet of Greek extraction. In 1885 he was disturbed by a journalistic attack on the decadents in which he was named together with Mallarme. He protested: "The so-called decadents seek the pure Concept and the eternal Symbol in their art, before anything else." With some contempt for the mania of

4 See my "Periods and Movements in Literary History," in English Institute Annual, 1940 (New York, 1941), pp. 73-93, and the chapter "Literary History" in

my and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (New York, 1949).

5 See my paper "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History" (1949), in

Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), pp. 128-99, and the passages on symbol and allegory in A History of Modern Criticism, 4 volumes (New Haven, 1955-65), e.g., I, 21o-11; II, 41-42, 76, 174-75; III, 221-22.

251

critics for labels, he suggested the term "Symbolistes" to replace the

inappropriate "decadents."6 In 1886 Moreas started a review Le Sym- boliste which perished after four issues. On September 18, 1886, he

published a manifesto of "Symbolisme" in Figaro.7 Moreas, however, soon deserted his own brain-child and founded another school he called "ecole romane." On September 14, 1891, in another number of

Figaro Moreas blandly announced that "symbolisme" was dead.8 Thus

"symbolisme" was an ephemeral name for a very small clique of French poets. The only name still remembered besides Moreas's is Gustave Kahn. It is easy to collect pronouncements by the main

contemporary poets repudiating the term for themselves. Verlaine, in

particular, was vehemently resentful of this "Allemandisme" and wrote even a little poem beginning "A bas le symbolisme mythe/ et termite."9

In a way which would need detailed tracing, the term, however,

caught on in the later 8o's and early go's as a blanket name for recent

developments in French poetry and its anticipations. Before Moreas' manifesto, Anatole Baju, in Decadent, April o1, 1886, spoke of Mal- larme as "the master who was the first to formulate the symbolic doctrine."10 Two critics, Charles Morice, with La Litterature de tout a l'heure (1889) and Teodor de Wyzewa, born in Poland, first in the

essay "Le Symbolisme de M. Mallarme" (1887), seemed to have been the main agents, though Morice spoke rather of "synthese" than of

symbol, and Wyzewa thought that "symbol" was only a pretext and

explained Mallarme's poetry purely by its analogy to music."l As

early as 1894 Saint Antoine (pseudonym for Henri Mazel) prophesied that "undoubtedly, symbolism will be the label under which our

period will be classed in the history of French literature."l2

6 Paul Bourde in Le Temps, 6 August 1885, was the aggressor, Moreas in XIXe

Siecle, "Les pretendus d6cadents cherchent avant tout dans leur art . . . le pur Concept et l'6ternel Symbole." Quoted from Guy Michaud, Message poetique du

symbolisme (Paris, 1947), II, 331. 7 Reprinted in Andre Barre, Le Symbolisme (Paris, 1911), p. io. 8 Quoted in M. Decaudin, La Crise des valeurs symbolistes (Toulouse, 1960), p. 22.

9 See Barre, pp. 160-61. Verlaine's verse in Invectives (1896). io Quoted from Michaud, II, 335: "Le maitre qui a formu6l le premier la doctrine symbolique." 11 See Michaud, II, 355 ff, cf. 427 ff. See also Wyzewa, Nos Maltres (Paris, 1895), pp. 115-29. On Morice, see Paul Delsemme, Un theoricien du symbolisme: Charles Morice (Paris, 1958). On Wyzewa, Elga L. Duval, Teodor de Wyzewa: Critic without a Country (Geneva, 1961). 12 Michel Decaudin, p. 15; quoted from L'Ermitage, June, 1894. "Telle est sans doute l'etiquette sous laquelle notre periode sera classe dans l'histoire de la litt6rature frangaise."



It is still a matter of debate in French literary history when this movement came to an end. It was several times revived expressly, e.g. in 1905 around a review, Vers et prose. Its main critic, Robert de Souza, in a series of articles, "Oui nous en sommes" (also published separately, 1906), ridiculed the many attempts to bury symbolism as

premature and proudly claimed that Gustave Kahn, Verhaeren, Viele- Griffin, Maeterlinck and Regnier were then as active as ever.l3 Valery professed so complete an allegiance to the ideals of Mallarme that it is difficult not to think of him as a continuator of symbolism, though in 1938, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the symbolist manifesto, Valery doubted the existence of symbolism and denied that there is a symbolist aesthetic.14 Marcel Proust in the

posthumously published last volume of his great series, Le Temps retrouve (1926), formulated an explicitly symbolist aesthetic. But his own attitude to symbolist contemporaries was often ambiguous or

negative. In 1896 Proust had written an essay condemning obscurity in poetry.15 Proust admired Maeterlinck but disliked PWguy and Claudel. He even wrote a pastiche of Regnier, a mock-solemn descrip- tion of a headcold.16 When Le Temps retrouve (1926) was published and when a few years later (1933) Valery Larbaud proclaimed Proust a symbolist, symbolism had, at least in French poetry, definitely been

replaced by surrealism.17 Andre Barre's book on symbolism (1911) and particularly Guy

Michaud's Message poetique du symbolisme (1947) as well as many other books of French literary scholarship have with the hindsight of

literary historians, traced the different phases of a vast French symbolist movement: the precursorship of Baudelaire who died in 1867, the second phase when Verlaine and Mallarme were at the height of their power before the 1886 group, the third phase when the name became established, and then in the twentieth century what Michaud calls "Neo-symbolisme" represented by "La Jeune Parque" of Valery and L'Annonce faite a Marie of Claudel, both dating from 1915.18 It seems a coherent and convincing conception which needs to be ex-

13 Vers et prose. Tome I, Mars - avril - Mai 1905, p. 79. "II me semble d'abord

que 1'enterrement du Symbolisme etait un peu premature, Craignons les inhuma- tions hatives."

14 "Existance du symbolisme" (1938) in Pleiade ed. (1957), I, 686-706.

15 "Contre l'obscuritW" in Revue blanche, 15 July 1896. Reprinted in Chroniques. 16 For details see Walter A. Strauss, Proust and Literature (Cambridge, Mass.,

1957), PP- 191-93, 204.

17 Preface to Emeric Fiser, L'Esthetique de Marcel Proust (Paris, 1933). 18 See also Michaud's paper "Symbolique et symbolisme" in Cahiers de l'As- sociation Internationale des Etudes Franfaises, VI (1954), 75ff.

253

tended to prose writers and dramatists: to Huysmans after A Rebours (1884), to the early Gide, to Proust in part and among dramatists, at least to Maeterlinck, who, with his plays L'Intruse and Les Aveugles (1890) and Pelleas et Melisande (1892), assured a limited penetration of symbolism on the stage.

Knowledge of the French movement and admiration for it spread soon to the other European countries. We must, however, distinguish between reporting on French events and even admiration shown by translations, and a genuine transfer and assimilation of the French movement in another literature. This process varies from country to country considerably; and the variation has to be explained by the different traditions with which the French importation was confronted.

In English, George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man (1888) and his Impressions and Opinions (1891) gave sketchy and often poorly informed accounts of Verlaine, Mallarme, Rimbaud and Lafor- gue. Mallarme's poetry is dismissed as "aberrations of a refined mind," and symbolism is oddly defined as "saying the opposite of what you mean." The three essays on Mallarme by Edmund Gosse, all dating from 1893, are hardly more perceptive. After the poet's death, Gosse turned sharply against him. "Now that he is no longer here the truth must be said about Mallarme. He was hardly a poet." Even Arthur Symons, whose book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) made the decisive breakthrough for England and Ireland, was very lukewarm at first. While praising Verlaine (in Academy, 1891) he referred to the "brain-sick little school of Symbolistes" and "the noisy little school of Decadents" and even in later articles on Mallarm6 he complained of "jargon and meaningless riddles."19 But then, he turned around and produced the entirely favorable Symbolist Move- ment. It should not, however, be overrated as literary criticism or history. It is a rather lame impressionistic account of Nerval, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Laforgue, Mallarme, Huysmans and Maeterlinck, with emphasis on Verlaine. There is no chapter on Bauderline.20 But most importantly, the book was dedicated to W. B. Yeats proclaiming him "the chief representative of that movement in our country." Symons had made his first trip to Paris in 1889; he had visited Mallarme, met Huysmans and Maeterlinck, and a year later met Verlaine, who in 1893 became his guest on his ill-fated visit to London. Symons knew Yeats vaguely since 1891, but they became close

19 For references see Bruce Morrissette, "Early English and American Critics of French Symbolism," in Studies in Honor of Frederick W. Shipley (St. Louis, Missouri, 1942), pp. 159-80. 20 A chapter on Baudelaire was added to the expanded edition in 1919.



friends in 1895 only after Yeats had completed his study of Blake and had elaborated his own system of symbols from other sources: occultism, Blake, and Irish folklore. The edition of Blake Yeats had

prepared with Edwin Ellis in 1893 was introduced by an essay on "The Necessity of Symbolism." In 1894 Yeats visited Paris in the

company of Symons and saw there a performance of Villiers de 1' Isle- Adams's Axel.21 The essay "The Symbolism of Poetry" (1900) is then Yeats' first full statement of his symbolist creed.22 Symons's dedication to Yeats shows an awareness of symbolism as an international movement: "In Germany," he says, exaggerating greatly, "it seems to be

permeating the whole of literature, its spirit is that which is deepest in Ibsen, it has absorbed the one new force in Italy, Gabriele D'An- nunzio. I am told of a group of symbolists in Russian literature, there is another in Dutch literature, in Portugal it has a little school of its own under Eugenio de Castro. I even saw some faint stirrings that

way in Spain." Symons should have added the United States. Or could he in 1899?

There were intelligent and sympathetic reports of the French movement very early. T. S. Perry wrote on "The Latest Literary Fashion in France" in The Cosmopolitan (1892), T. Child on "Literary Paris - The New Poetry" in Harper's (1896), and Aline Gorren on "The French Symbolists" in Scribner's (1893). The almost forgotten Vance

Thompson, who fresh from Paris, edited the oddly named review M'lle New York, wrote several perceptive essays, mainly on Mallarme in 1895 (reprinted in French Portraits, 1900) which convey some accurate information on his theories and attempt even some explica- tion of his poetry with some success.23 But only James Huneker became the main importer of recent French literature into the United States. In 1896 he defended the French symbolists against the slurs in Max Nordau's silly Entartung and began to write a long series of articles on Maeterlinck, Laforgue and many others, not bothering to conceal his dependence on his French master, Remy de Gourmont to whom he dedicated his book of essays, Visionaries (1905).24 But the

21 See Richard Ellmann's Introduction to the 1958 New York reprint of The

Symbolist Movement. On Symons see Roger Lhombreaud, Arthur Symons, A Critical

Biography (London, 1963), and Ruth Zabriskie Temple, The Critic's Alchemy: A Study of the Introduction of French Symbolism into England (New Haven, 1953) ? 22 Reprinted in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903); since in Essays and Introductions

(New York, 1961), pp. 153-64.

23 See Morrissette's paper quoted in note 19.

24 See Arnold T. Schwab, J. G. Huneker, Critic of the Seven Arts (Stanford, 1963).

255

actual impact of French symbolist poetry on American writing was

greatly delayed. Rene Taupin in his L'Influence du symbolisme franfais sur la poesie americaine (1929) traced some echoes in forgotten American versifiers of the turn of the century but only two Ameri- cans living then in England, Ezra Pound around 1908 and T. S. Eliot around 1914, reflect the French influence in significant poetry.

More recently and in retrospect one hears of a symbolist period in American literature: Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens are its main

poets, Henry James, Faulkner and O'Neill, in very different ways and in different stages of their career, show marked affinities with its

teshniques and outlook. Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) was

apparently the very first book which definitely conceived of symbolism as an international movement and singled out Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Valery, Proust, and Thomas Mann as examples of a movement which, he believed, had come to an end in the time of his

writing. Here we find the conception formulated which, very gen- erally, is the thesis of this paper and the assumption of many historians since Wilson's sketch. Wilson's sources were the writings of Hune- ker whom he admired greatly, and the instruction in French literature he received at Princeton from Christian Gauss.25 But the insight into the unity and continuity of the international movement and the selection of the great names was his own. We might only deplore the inclusion of Gertrude Stein. But I find it difficult to believe that Wilson's book could have had any influence outside the English-speaking world.

In the United States, Wilson's reasonable and moderate plea for an international movement was soon displaced by attempts to make the whole of the American literary tradition symbolist. F. 0. Matthiessen's The American Renaissance (1941) is based on a distinction introduced

by Goethe. Allegory appears as inferior to symbol: Hawthorne inferior to Melville. But in Charles Feidelson's Symbolism and American Literature (1956) the distinction between moder symbolism and the use of symbols by Romantic authors is completely obliterated. Emer- son, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and Whitman appear as pure symbolists avant la lettre and their ancestry is traced back to the Puritans who, paradoxically, appear as incomplete, frustrated symbolists. It can be objected that the old Puritans were sharply inimical to images and symbols and that there is a gulf between the religious conception of signs of God's Providence and the aesthetic use of symbols in the

25 On Huneker see Classics and Commercials (New York, 1950), p. 114, and The Shores of Light (New York, 1952), p. 73. On Gauss the essay introducing that volume.



novels of Hawthorne and Melville and even in the Platonizing aesthetics of Emerson.26

The symbolist conception of American literature is still prevalent today. It owes its dominance to the attempt to exalt the great Ameri- can writers to myth-makers and providers of a substitute religion. James Baird, in Ishmael (1956), puts it unabashedly, Melville is "the

supreme example of the artistic creator engaged in the act of making new symbols to replace the 'lost' symbols of Protestant Christianity."27 A very active trend in American criticism expanded symbolist inter-

pretation to all types and periods of literature imposing it on writings which have no such meaning or have to be twisted to assume it. Harry Levin rightly complained in an address, "Symbolism and Fiction"

(1956), that "every hero may seem to have a thousand faces; every heroine may be a white goddess incognita; and every fishing trip turns out to be another quest for the Holy Grail."28 The impact of ideas from the Cambridge anthropologists and from Carl Jung is obvious. In the study of medieval texts, a renewed interest in the four- fold levels of meaning in Dante's "Letter to Can Grande" has per- suaded a whole group of American scholars to interpret or misinter-

pret Chaucer, the Pearl poet, and Langland, in these terms.29 They should bear in mind that Thomas Aquinas recognized only a literal sense in a work invented by human industry and that he reserved the other three senses for Scripture.30 The symbolist interpretation reaches heights of ingenuity in the writing of Northrop Frye who

began with a book on Blake and, in The Anatomy of Criticism

(1957), conceived of the whole of literature as a self-enclosed system of symbols and myths, "existing in its own universe, no longer a com-

mentary on life or reality, but containing life and reality in a system of verbal relationships." In this grandiose conception all distinctions between periods and styles are abolished: "the literary universe is a universe in which everything is potentially identical with everything

26 Cf. Ursula Brumm, Die religiose Typologie im amerikanischen Denken (Leiden, 1963), e.g., p. 8ff.

27 Baltimore, 1956, p. xv.

28 Contexts of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 207.

29 I allude particularly to D. W. Robertson's A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, 1963), and D. W. Robertson and B. F. Hupp6's Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition (Princeton, 1951) .

30 Cf. Morton W. Bloomfield, "Symbolism in Medieval Literature" in Modern

Philology, LVI (1958), pp. 73-81. He quotes Thomas Aquinas, Questiones quodlibetales, VII. a. 16. "Unde in nulla scientia, humana industria inventa, proprio loquendo, potest inveniri nisi litteralis sensus; sed solum in ista Scriptura, cujus Spiritus sanctus est auctor, homo verum instrumentum."

257

else."31 Hence the old distinctions between myth, symbol and allegory disappear. One of Frye's followers, Angus Fletcher, in his book on

Allegory (1964), exalts allegory to the central procedure of art, while

Frye still holds fast to symbolism, recognizing that "the critics are often prejudiced against allegory without knowing the real reason, which is that continuous allegory prescribes the direction of his com-

mentary, and so restricts his freedom."32 The story of the spread of symbolism is very different in other

countries. The effect in Italy was ostensibly rather small. Soffici's

pamphlet on Rimbaud, in 1911, is usually considered the beginning of the French symbolist influence, but there was an early propagandist for Mallarme, Vittorio Pica, who was heavily dependent on his French sources, particularly Teodor de Wyzewa. His articles in the Gazette letteraria (1885-6) on the French poets do not use the term; but in

1896 he replaced "decadent" and "Byzantine" by "symbolist."33 D'Annunzio, who knew and used some French symbolists, would be classed as "decadent" today, and the poets around Ungaretti and Montale as "hermetic." In a recent book by Mario Luzi, L'idea simbolista (1959), Pasoli, Dino Campana, and Arturo Onofri are called symbolist poets, but Luzi uses the term so widely that he begins his anthology of symbolism with Holderlin and Novalis, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and can include Poe, Browning, Patmore, Swin- burne, Hopkins and Francis Thompson among its precursors. Still, his list of symbolist poets, French, Russian, English, German, Spanish and Greek is, on the whole, reasonable.34 Onofri was certainly strongly influenced by Mallarme and later by Rudolf Steiner; Pascoli, however, seems to me no symbolist in his poetry, though he gave extremely symbolist interpretations of Dante.35 It might be wiser to think of "ermetismo" as the Italian name for symbolism: Montale and possibly Campana are genuine symbolists.

While symbolism at least as a definite school or movement was absent in Italy, it is central in the history of Spanish poetry. The Nicaraguan poet, Ruben Dario initiated it after his short stay in Paris

31 Princeton, 1957, pp. 122, 124.

32 Ibid., p. go.

33 See Olga Ragusa, "Vittorio Pica: First Champion of French Symbolism in Italy" in Italica, XXXV (1958), 255-61, and Luigi de Nardis, "Prospettive critiche per uno studio su Vittorio Pica e il decadentismo francese" in Revista de letterature moderne e comparate, XIX (1966), 202-9.

34 Milano, 1959. Luzi lists besides the French Bryusov, Balmont, Ivanov, Blok, Yeats, Eliot; George, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Benn; Pascoli, D'Annunzio, Onofri, Campana; Dario, Antonio Machado, Jimenez, and the Greek Chantzopoulos. 35 Pascoli, Minerva oscura (1898), Conferenze e studi dantesche (1921), etc.



in 1892. He wrote poems under the symbolist influence and addressed, for instance, a fervent hymn to Verlaine.36 The influence of French

symbolist poetry changed completely the oratorical or popular style of

Spanish lyrical poetry. The closeness of Guillen to Mallarme and

Valery seems too obvious to deny and the Uruguayan poet Julio Herrera y Reissig (1873-1909) is clearly in the symbolist tradition, often of the obscurest manner.37 Still, the Spanish critics favor the term "Modernismo" which is used sometimes so inclusively that it covers all modern Spanish poetry and even the so-called "generation of 1898," the prose writers Azorin, Baroja and Unamuno, whose asso- ciations with symbolism were quite tenuous.38 "Symbolism" can apply only to one trend in modern Spanish literature as the romantic popular tradition was there stronger than elsewhere. Garcia Lorca's poetry can serve as the best known example of the peculiar Spanish synthesis of the folksy and the symbolical, the gipsy song and myth. Still, the

continuity from Dario to Jimenez, Antonio Machado, Alberti, and then to Guillen seems to me evident. Jorge Guillen in his Harvard lectures, Language and Poetry (1961), finds "no label convincing." "A period look," he argues, does not signify a "group style." In Spain there were, he thinks, fewer "isms" than elsewhere and the break with the past was far less abrupt. He reflects that "any name seeking to

give unity to a historical period is the invention of posterity." But while eschewing the term "symbolism," he characterizes himself and his contemporaries well enough by expounding their common creed: their belief in the marriage of Idea and Music, in short, their belief in the ideal of Mallarme.39 Following a vague suggestion made by Remy de Gourmont, the rediscovery of G6ngora by Ortega y Gasset, Gerardo Diego, Damaso Alonso, and Alfonso Reyes around 1927 fits into the picture: they couple Gongora and Mallarme as the two

poets who in the history of all poetry have gone furthest in the search for absolute poetry, for the quintessence of the poetic.40

In Germany, the spread of symbolism was far less complete than

36 "Verlaine: Responso" beginning "Padre y maestro magico, liriforo celeste." On Dario see E. K. Mapes, L'Influence franfaise dans l'oeuvre de Ruben Dario

(Paris, 1925).

37 Cf. Bernard Gicovate, Julio Herrera y Reissig (Berkeley, 1957).

38 See Gustav Siebenmann, Die moderne Lyrik in Spanien (Stuttgart, 1965), esp., pp. 43ff., and Guillermo Diaz-Plaja, Modernismo frente a Noventa y Ocho (Madrid, 1951)

39 Cambridge, Mass., 1961, p. 214.

40 Remy de Gourmont, Promenades litteraires, IVe s6rie (Paris, 1912). Damaso Alonso, Gdngora y la literatura contempordnea (Santander, 1932); also in Estudios

y ensayos g6ngorinos (Madrid, 1955).

259

Symons assumed in 1899. Stefan George had come to Paris in 1889, had visited Mallarme and met many poets, but after his return to

Germany he avoided, I assume deliberately, the term "symbolism" for himself and his circle. He translated a selection from Baudelaire

(1891) and smaller samples from Mallarme, Verlaine and Regnier in Zeitgenossische Dichter (1905), but his own poetry does not, I think, show very close parallels to the French masters. Oddly enough, the

poems of Viele-Griffin seem to have left the most clearly discernible traces on George's own writings.41 As early as 1892 one of George's adherents, Carl August Klein, protested in George's periodical, Blitter fur die Kunst, against the view of George's dependence on the French. Wagner, Nietzsche, Bocklin and Klinger, he says, show that there is an indigenous opposition to naturalism in Germany as everywhere in the West.42 George himself spoke later of the French poets as his "former allies" and in Gundolf's authoritative book on George, the French influence is minimized if not completely denied.43 Among the theorists of the George circle Friedrich Gundolf had the strongest symbolist leanings: Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (191l) and Goethe (19 6) are based on the distinction of symbol-allegory with

symbol always the higher term.44 Still, the term symbolism did not catch on in Germany as a name for any specific poetic group, though Hofmannsthal, e.g. in "Das Gesprach iiber Gedichte" (1903), proclaimed the symbol the one element necessary in poetry.45 Later, the influence of Rimbaud - apparently largely in German translation -

on Georg Trakl can be demonstrated with certainty.46 But if we examine German books on twentieth-century literature, symbolism seems rarely used. I found a section so called in Willi Duwe's Die

Dichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts (1936) which includes Hofmannsthal,

41 See B. B6schenstein, "Wirkungen des franzosischen Symbolismus auf die deutsche Lyrik der Jahrhundertwende," in Euphorion, LVIII (1964), 375-95. Werner

Vordtriede, "Direct Echoes of French Poetry in Stefan George's Works" in Modern

Languages Notes, LX (1945), 461-68, lists trivial parallels to Baudelaire and Mal- larm6. More in Claude David, Stefan George. Son oeuvre poetique (Paris, 1952).

42 Vol. I, No. 2, "Uber Stefan George, eine neue Kunst", reprinted in Die Sendung Stefan Georges (Berlin, 1935), pp. 69-70. 43 "Stern des Bundes," quoted in David, p. 285. Gundolf, George (Berlin, 1920),

pp. 50-51. 44 Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Berlin, 1914), pp. 1-2 for distinction of symbol-allegory; and Goethe (Berlin, 1916), pp. 16, 28, for classification of Goethe's works.

45 Prosa, II, 104.

46 See Boschenstein, quoted in note 41, and Herbert Lindenberger, "Georg Trakl and Rimbaud," in Comparative Literature, X (1958), 21-35. Trakl read the translation by K. L. Ammer (pseudonym of Karl Klammer) published in 1907.

26o NEWV LITERARY HISTORY


Dauthendey, Cale, Rilke and George, while E. H. Liith's Literatur als Geschichte (Deutsche Dichtung von 1885 bis 1947), published in 1947, treats the same poets under the label "Neuromantik und Impressionis- mus." Later, however, we find a section "Parasymbolismus" which deals with Musil and Broch. Hugo Friedrich, in his Struktur der modernen Lyrik (1956), avoids the term and argues that the quick succession of modernist styles: dadaism, surrealism, futurism, expressionism, unanimism, hermetism, etc. creates an optical illusion which hides the fact of a direct continuity between Mallarme, Valdry, Guil- 16n, Ungaretti and Eliot.47 The little anthology in the back of the book adds St. John Perse, Jimenez, Garcia Lorca, Alberti and Montale to these names. Friedrich's list seems to me the list of the main symbolist poets even though Friedrich objects to the name. Clearly, German literary scholarship has not been converted to the term, though Wolfgang Kayser's article "Der europaische Symbolismus" (1953), had pleaded for a wide concept in which he included, in addition to the French poets, D'Annunzio, Yeats, Valery, Proust, Vir-

ginia Woolf and Faulkner.48 In Russia we find the strongest symbolist group of poets who called

themselves that. The close links with Paris at that time may help to

explain this, or possibly also the strong consciousness of a tradition of

symbolism in the Russian Church and in some of the Orthodox thinkers of the immediate past. Vladmirir Solovev was thought of as a precursor. In 1892 Zinaida Vengerova wrote a sympathetic account of the French symbolists for Vestnik Evropy49 while in the following year Max Nordau's Entartung caused a sensation for its satirical account of recent French poetry which reverberated as late as in Tols-

toy's What is Art? (1898). Bryusov emerged as the leading symbolist poet: he translated Maeterlinck's L'lntruse and wrote a poem "Iz Rimbaud" as early as 1892.50 In 1894 he published two little volumes under the title Russkie simvolisty. That year Bryusov wrote poems with titles such as "In the spirit of the French symbolists" and "In the manner of Stephane Mallarme" (though these were not published till

1935) and brought out a translation of Verlaine's Romances sans paroles.5' Bryusov had later contacts with Rene Ghil, Mallarme's

pupil, and derived from him the idea of "instrumentation" in poetry

47 Hamburg, 1956, p. o18.

48 In Die Vortragsreise (Bern, 1958), pp. 287-304. 49 IX (1892), 115-43. Reprinted in Literaturnye Kharakteristiki (St. Petersburg, 1897) 50 cf. G. Donchin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry (The Hague, 1958), p. 23. 51 In Neizdannye stikhotvoreniya (Moscow, 1935), pp. 426, 428.

261

which was to play a great role in the theories of the Russian formalists.52 In the meantime Dimitri Merezhkovsky had, in 1893, published a manifesto: "On the causes of the decline and the new trends of con-

temporary Russian literature," which recommended symbolism though Merezhkovsky appealed to the Germans: to Goethe and the Romantics rather than to the French.53 Merezhkovsky's pamphlet fore- shadows the split in the Russian symbolist movement. The younger men, Blok and Vyacheslav Ivanov as well as Bely distanced themselves from Bryusov and Balmont. Blok in an early diary (1901-02) con- demned Bryusov as decadent and opposed to his Parisan symbolism his own, Russian, rooted in the poetry of Tyutchev, Fet, Polonsky, and Solovev.54 Vyacheslav Ivanov in 1910, shared Blok's view. The French influence seemed to him "adolescently unreasonable and, in fact, not

very fertile," while his own symbolism appealed to Russian national- ism and to the general mystical tradition.55 Later Bely was to add occultism, Rudolf Steiner and his "anthroposophy." The group of

poets which called themselves "Acmeists" (Gumilev, Anna Akhma- tova, Osip Mandelshtam) was a direct outgrowth of Symbolism.56 The mere fact that they appealed to the early symbolist Innokenty Annen-

sky shows the continuity with Symbolism in spite of their distaste for the occult and their emphasis on what they thought of as classical

clarity. Symbolism dominates Russian poetry between about 1892 and

1914 when Futurism emerged as a slogan and the Russian formalists attacked the whole concept of poetry as imagery.

If we glance at the other Slavic countries we are struck by the di-

versity of their reactions. Poland was early informed about the French movement, and Polish poetry was influenced by the French symbolist movement but the term "Mltoda Polska" was preferred. In Wilhelm Feldmann's Wspotczesna literatura polska (1905) contemporary poetry is discussed as "decadentism" but Wyspiafiski (a symbolist if ever there was one) appears under the chapter heading: "On the heights of romanticism."57 All the histories of Polish literature I have seen

52 See Lettres de Rene Ghil (Paris, 1935), pp. 13-16, 18-20, and Ghil's Traite du verbe (Paris, 1886). 53 0 princhinakh upadka i o novykh techenyakh sovremennoy russkoy literatury (St. Petersburg, 1893).

54 "Yunocheski dnevnik Aleksandra Bloka" (1901-2), in Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, XXVII-XXVIII (1937), 302. 55 "Zavety simvolizma," in Apollon, VIII (1910), 13, and in Borozdy i mezhi

(Moscow, 1916), p. 133. 56 For a good discussion see Jurij Striedter, "Transparenz und Verfremdung: Zur Theorie des poetischen Bildes in der russichen Moderne" in Immanente Aesthetik: Aesthetische Reflexion, ed. Wolfgang Iser (Munich, 1966), pp. 263-89. 57 In Vol. III: "Na wyiynach romantyzmu."



speak of "Modernism," "Decadentism," "Idealism," "Neo-romanticism" and occasionally call a poet such as Miriam (Zenon Przesmycki) a symbolist but they never seem to use the term as a general name for a period in Polish literature.58

In Czech literature the situation was more like that in Russia: Bfezina, Sova, and Hlavacek were called symbolists and the idea of a school or at least a group of Czech symbolist poets is firmly established. The term "Moderna" (possibly because of the periodical, Moderni Revue founded in 1894) is definitely associated with decadentism, fin de siecle, a group represented by Arnost Prochazka. A hymnical, optimistic, even chiliastic poet such as BEezina cannot and could not be classed with them. The great critic F. X. Salda wrote of the "school of symbolists" as early as 1891, calling Verlaine, Villiers and Mallarm6 its masters but denying that there is a school of symbolists with dogmas, codices and manifestoes.59 His very first important article "Synthetism in the new art" (1892) expounded the aesthetics of Morice and Hennequin for the benefit of the Czechs, then still mainly dependent on German models.60

The unevenness of the penetration both of the influence of the French movement and very strikingly of the acceptance of our term raises the question whether we can account for these differences in causal terms. It sounds heretical or obscurantist in this age of scientif- ic explanation to ascribe much to chance, to casual contacts and personal predilections. Why was the term so immensely successful in France, in the United States and in Russia, less so in England and Spain and hardly at all in Italy and Germany? In Germany there was even the tradition of the continuous debate about symbol since Goethe and Schelling; before the French movement Friedrich Theo- dor Vischer discussed the symbol elaborately and still the term did not catch on.61 One can think of all kinds of explanations: a deliberate

58 Zenon Presmycki had written an essay on Maeterlinck in 1891 (in Swiat). More in Henryk Markiewicz, "Mtoda Polska i 'izmy'," in Iz Problemow literatury polskiej XX wieku, Tome I (Warsaw, 1965), pp. 7-51, esp., p. 15; Teofil Wojeiski, Historia literatury polskiej (Warsaw, 1946) has a chapter entitled "Symbolism i

Neoromantyzm w Polsce"; Julian Krzyzanowski, Neoromantyzm Polski, 189o0-198

(Wroclaw- Warszawa, 1963), has a chapter, "Drama naturalistyczno-symboliczny," pp. 182ff.

59 "0 skole symbolistu" in Kritchke projevy (Prague, 1947), I, 185-86. Originally as "Zaslano" in Literarni listy, XIII (1891), 46-68, 65-66, 85-86. See J. Pistorius, Bibliografie dila F. X. Saldy (Prague, 1948), p. 79. 60 "Synthetism v nov6m umeni," originally in Literarni listy (1891-2). A brief discussion in my "Modern Czech Criticism and Literary Scholarship," in Essays on Czech Literature (The Hague, 1963), pp. 179-80. 61 "Das Symbol" (1887) in Altes und Neues, Neue Folge, 1889.

263

decision by the poets to distance themselves from the French developments; or the success of the terms "Die Moderne" and "Neuroman- tik." Still, the very number of such explanations suggests that the vari- ables are so great that we cannot account for these divergencies in any systematic manner.

If we, at long last, turn to the central question: what is the exact contents of the term, we must obviously distinguish among the four concentric circles defining its scope. At its narrowest, "symbolism" refers to the French group which called itself so in 1886. Its theory was rather rudimentary. These poets mainly wanted poetry to be non- rhetorical, i.e. they asked for a break with the tradition of Hugo and the Parnassiens. They wanted words not merely to state but to suggest; they wanted to use metaphors, allegories and symbols not only as decorations but as organizing principles of their poems; they wanted their verse to be "musical," in practice to stop using the oratorical cadences of the French alexandrines, and in some cases to break

completely with rhyme. Free verse - whose invention is usually ascribed to Gustave Kahn - was possibly the most enduring achieve- ment which has survived all vicissitudes of style. Kahn himself in 1894 summed up the doctrine simply as "antinaturalism, antiprosaism in

poetry, a search for freedom in the efforts in art, in reaction against the regimentation of the Parnasse and the naturalists."62 This sounds

very meager today: freedom from restrictions has been after all, the

slogan of a great many movements in art. It is better to think of "symbolism" in a wider sense: as the broad

movement in France from Nerval and Baudelaire to Claudel and

Valery. We can restate the theories propounded and will be confronted by an enormous variety. We can characterize it more concretely and say, for example, that in symbolist poetry the image becomes "thing." The relation of tenor and vehicle in the metaphor is reversed. The utterance is divorced, we may add, from the situation: time and place, history and society are played down. The inner world, la duree, in the Bergsonian sense, is represented or often merely hinted at as "it," the thing or the person hidden. One could say that the gram- matical predicate has become the subject. Clearly such poetry can easily be justified by an occult view of the world. But this is not necessary: it might simply imply a feeling for analogy, for a web of correspondences, a rhetoric of metamorphoses in which everything reflects everything else. Hence the great role of synaesthesia, which,

62 Decaudin, p. 15; quoted from La Societe nouvelle, avril, 1894. "Anti-natural- isnie, anti-prosaisme de la poesie, recherche de la libert6 dans des efforts dans l'art, en reaction contre l'enregimentation parnassienne ou naturaliste."



though rooted in physiological facts and found all over the history of

poetry, became at that time merely a stylistic device, a mannerism easily imitated and transmitted.63 This characterization could be elaborated considerably if we bear in mind that style and world-view go together and only together can define the character of a period or even of a single poet.

Let me try to show, at least, how diverse and even incompatible were the theories of two such related poets as Baudelaire and Mal- larm6. Baudelaire's aesthetic is mainly "romantic"; not in the sense of emotionalism, nature worship and exaltation of the ego, central in French romanticism, but rather in the English and German tradition of a glorification of creative imagination, a rhetoric of metamor-

phoses and universal analogy. Though there are subsidiary strands in Baudelaire's aesthetics, at his finest, he grasps the role of imagination, "constructive imagination," as he calls it in a term ultimately derived from Coleridge.64 It gives a metaphysical meaning, "a positive relation with the infinite."65 Art is another cosmos which transforms and hence humanizes nature. By his creation the artist abolishes the gulf between subject and object, man and nature. Art is "to create a

suggestive magic containing at one and the same time the object and the subject, the external world and the artist himself."66

Mallarm6 says almost the opposite in spite of some superficial resemblances and the common attachment to Poe and Wagner. Mal- larm6 was the first poet radically discontent with the ordinary lan-

guage of communication; he attempted to construe an entirely sepa- rate language of poetry far more consistently than older cultivators of "poetic diction" such as the practitioners of trobar clus, or G6ngora or Mallarme's contemporary, Gerard Manley Hopkins. His aim of

transforming language was no doubt in part negative: to exclude

society, nature and the person of the poet himself. But it was also

positive: language was again to become "real," language was to be

magic, words were to become things. But this is not, I think, sufficient reason to call Mallarm6 a mystic. Even the depersonalization he

63 See the many articles by Albert Wellek, e.g., "Das Doppelempfinden in der

Geistesgeschichte," in Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik, XXIII (1929), 14-32; "Das Dop- pelempfinden im 18. Jahrhundert," in Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift fiur Geistes-

geschichte und Literahurwissenchaft, XIV (1936), 75-102.

64 "Constructive imagination" quoted in English from Mrs. Catherine Crowe, The

Night Side of Nature, in Curiositds esthetiques, Conard ed. (Paris, 1923), p. 279.

65 Ibid., p. 275. "Elle est positivement apparentee avec l'infini."

66 L'Art romantique, Conard ed. (Paris, 1925), p. 119: "C'est creer une magie suggestive contenant A la fois l'objet et le sujet, le monde exterieur a l'artiste et l'artiste lui-meme."

265

requires is not mystical. Impersonality is rather objectivity, Truth. Art reaches for the Idea, which is ultimately inexpressible, because so abstract and general as to be devoid of any concrete traits. The term "flower" seems to him poetic because it suggests the "one, absent from all bouquets."67 Art thus can only hint and suggest, not trans- form as it should in Baudelaire. The "symbol" is only one device to achieve this effect. The so-called "negative" aesthetics of Mallarme is thus nothing obscure. It had its psychological basis in a feeling of sterility, impotence and final silence. He was a perfectionist, who proposed something impossible of fulfillment: the book to end all books. "Everything on earth exists to be contained in a book."68 Like many poets before him, Mallarme wants to express the mystery of the universe but feels that this mystery is not only insoluble and immensely dark but also hollow, empty, silent, Nothingness itself. There seems no need to appeal to Buddhism, Hegel, Schopenhauer or Wagner to account for this.69 The atmosphere of nineteenth-century pessimism and the general Neo-Platonic tradition in aesthetics suffice. Art searches for the Absolute but despairs of ever reaching it. The essence of the world is Nothingness, and the poet can only speak of this Nothingness. Art alone survives in the universe. Man's main vocation is to be an artist, a poet, who can save something from the general wreckage of time. The work or, in Mallarme's terms, the Book, is suspended over the Void, the silent godless Nothingness, Po- etry is resolutely cut off from concrete reality, from the expression of the personality of the poet, from any rhetoric or emotion, and becomes only a Sign, signifying Nothing.70 In Baudelaire, on the other hand, poetry transforms nature, extracts flowers from evil, creates a new myth, reconciles man and nature.

But if we examine the actual verse of the symbolists of this period we cannot be content with formulas either of creative imagination, suggestion, pure or absolute poetry.

67 Oeuvres completes, Pleiade ed. (Paris, 1949), p. 368: "une fleur . . . l'absente de tous bouquets." 68 Ibid., p. 378: "Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir a un livre." 69 Jacques Scherer, L'Expression litteraire dans l'ceuvre de Mallarme (Paris, 1947), pp. 155 ff, collects evidence for Mallarme's contacts with Platonism and occultism. Mallarme denied knowledge of Buddhism, Propos sur la poesie, ed. H. Mondor (Monaco, 1946), p. 59. Hasye Cooperman, The Aesthetic of Stephane Mallarme (New York, 1933), makes much of the influence of Wagner. The only evidence of concern for Hegel is a letter of Villiers d'Isle-Adam to Mallarme, quoted in Henri Mondor, Vie de Mallarme (Paris, 1941), p. 222; "Quant a Hegel, je suis vraiment bien heureux que vous ayez accorde quelque attention a ce miraculeux genie." 70 See Guy Defel, L'Esthetique de Stephane Mallarme (Paris, 1951).



On the third wider circle of abstraction we can apply the term to the whole period on an international scale. Every such term is arbi-

trary, but symbolism can be defended as rooted in the concepts of the

period, as distinct in meaning and as clearly setting off the period from that preceding it: realism or naturalism. The difference from romanticism may be less certainly implied. Obviously there is a continuity with romanticism and particularly German romanticism, also in France as has been recently argued again by Werner Vordtried in his Novalis und die franzosichen Symbolisten (1963) .71 The direct contact of the French with the German romantics came late and should not be overrated. Jean Thorel in "Les Romantiques allemandes et les symbolists franqaises," seems to have been the first to point out the relation.72 Maeterlinck's article on Novalis (1894) and his little anthology (1896) came late in the movement.73 But Wagner of course mediated between the symbolists and German mythology though Mallarme's attitude, admiring toward the music, was tingled with irony for Wagner's subject matter.74 Early in the century, Heine, a romantique defroque as he called himself, played the role of an in-

termediary which, to my mind, has been exaggerated in Kurt Wein-

berg's study: Henri Heine: heraut du symbolisme franfais (1954).75 E. T. A. Hoffmann, we should not forget, was widely translated into French and could supply occult motifs, a transcendental view of music and the theory and practice of synaesthesia.

Possibly even more important were the indirect contacts through English writers: through Carlyle's chapter on symbolism in Sartor Resartus and his essay on Novalis; through Coleridge from whom, through another intermediary, Mrs. Crowe, Baudelaire drew his definition of creative imagination; and through Emerson, who was translated by Edgar Quinet.76

Also French thinkers of the early nineteenth century knew the the-

ory of symbolism, at least, in the wide application to all the religions of the world made by Creuzer whose Symbolik was translated into

71 Stuttgart, 1963.

72 In Entretiens politiques et litteraires, September 1891.

73 In Nouvelle Revue, 1894, and Les Disciples a Sais, suivi de Fragments (Bruxel- les, 1985). The article on Novalis is included in Le Tresor des humbles (1896).

74 Cf. "Richard Wagner: Reverie d'un poUte francais" (1885) in Pleiade ed., pp. 541-45.

75 New Haven, 1954.

76 A. G. Lehmann, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 1885-I895 (Oxford, 1950), makes good suggestions.

267

French in 1825.77 Pierre Leroux used the idea of "symbolic poetry" prominently in the early thirties.78 There was Edgar Allan Poe who drew on Coleridge and A. W. Schlegel and seemed so closely to antici-

pate Bauderlaire's views that Bauderlaire quoted him as if he were Poe himself, sometimes dropping all quotation marks.79

The enormous influence of Poe on the French demonstrates, however, most clearly the difference between romanticism and symbolism. Poe is far from being a representative of the romantic world view or of the romantic aesthetic in which imagination is conceived as trans-

forming nature. Poe has been aptly described as an "angel in a machine": he combines a faith in technique and even technology, a distrust of inspiration, a rationalistic eighteenth-century mind with a

vague occult belief in "supernal" beauty.80 The distrust of inspiration, the enmity to nature is the crucial point which sets symbolism from romanticism. Baudelaire, Mallarme, Valery all share it; while Rilke, a symbolist in many of his procedures and views, appears as highly romantic in his reliance on moments of inspiration. This is why Hugo Friedrich excludes him from his book on the modern lyric and even

disparages him in a harsh passage.81 This is why the attempt to make Mallarme a spiritual descendant of Novalis, as Vordtriede tried, must fail. Mallarme, one might grant, aims at transcendence but it is an

empty transcendence while Novalis rapturously adores the unity of the mysterious universe. In short, the Romantics were Rousseauists, the symbolists beginning with Baudelaire believe in the fall of man or if they do not use the religious phraseology, know that man is limited and is not, as Novalis believed, the Messiah of nature. The end of the romantic period is clearly marked by the victory of posi- tivism and scientism, which soon led to disillusionment and pessimism. Most symbolists were non-Christians and even atheists, even if they tried to find a new religion in occultism or flirted with Oriental reli-

gions. They were pessimists who need not have read Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, as Laforgue did, to succumb to the mood

77 Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker (1810) ap- peared as Religions de l'antiquite considerees dans leurs formes symbolistes, translated by Guigniaut in 1825.

78 See "Du style symbolique" in Le Globe, 29 March and 8 April, 1829, and a series of articles in Revue Encyclopedique, 1831. See my History of Modern Criticism, III, 27-28.

79 In the essay on Gautier Baudelaire reproduces "The Poetic Principle." See also Marcel Frangon, "Poe et Baudelaire" in PMLA, LX (1945), 841-59.

80 See my chapter in History of Modern Criticism, III, 152-63.

81 Struktur der modernen Lyrik, p. 116.



of decadence, fin de siecle, G6tterdimmerung, or the death of God

prophesied by Nietzsche.82

Symbolism is also clearly set off from the new avant-garde movements after 1915: futurism, cubism, surrealism, expressionism, etc. There the faith in language has crumbled completely while in Mal- larme and Valery language preserves it cognitive and even magic power; Valery's collection of poems is rightly called Charmes. Orpheus is the mythological hero of the poet: charming the animals, trees and even stones. With more recent art the view of analogy disappears: Kafka has nothing of it. Post-symbolist art is abstract and allegorical rather than symbolic. The image, in surrealism, has no beyond: it wells, at most, from the subconscious of the individual.

Finally, there is the highest abstraction, the wide largest circle; the use of "symbolism" in all literature, of all ages. But then the term, broken loose from its historical moorings, lacks concrete content and remains merely the name for a phenomenon almost universal in all art.

These reflections must lead to what only can be a recommendation, to use the third sense of our term, to call the period of European literature roughly between 1885 and 1914 "symbolism," to see it as an international movement which radiated originally from France but

produced great writers and great poetry also elsewhere. In Great Britain, Yeats and Eliot; in the United States, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane; in Germany, George, Rilke and Hofmannsthal; in Russia, Blok, Ivanov and Bely; in Spain and South America, Dario, Machado and Guillen. If we, as we should, extend the meaning of

symbolism to prose, we can see it clearly in the late Henry James, in

Joyce, the later Thomas Mann, in Proust, in the early Gide, in Faulkner, and in D. H. Lawrence; and if we add the drama, we recognize it in the later stages of Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann and in O'Neill. There is symbolist criticism of distinction: an aesthetics in Mallarme and Valery, a looser creed in Remy de Gourmont, in Eliot and in Yeats and there is a flourishing school of symbolist interpretation particularly in the United States. Much of the French "new criticism" is frankly symbolist. Roland Barthes's new pamphlet, Criti-

que et verite (1966), pleads for a complete liberty of symbolist interpretation.

Still, we must not forget our initial reminder. A period concept can never exhaust its meaning. It is not a class concept of which the individual works are cases. It is a regulative idea: it struggles with preced-

82 See the review of Vordtriede's Novalis by Hans Robert Jauss in Romanische

Forschungen, LXXVII (1965), 174-83.

269

ing and following ideals of art. In the time under consideration the

strength of the survivals was particularly great: Hauptmann's Die Weber was performed in the same year (1892) as Die Bldtter fur die Kunst began to appear; Blok's Poems on the Beautiful Lady were written in the same year (1901) as Gorky's Lower Depths. Within the same author and even within the same work of art the struggle was waged at times. Edmond Jaloux called Joyce "at the same time a realist and a symbolist."83 The same is true of Proust and Mann.

Ulysses combines symbolism and naturalism as no other book of the time into a synthesis of grand proportion and strong tension. In Trieste Joyce lectured on two English writers and on two English writers alone: they were characteristically Defoe and Blake.84

As agreement on the main periods of European literature grows, so agreement to add the period term "symbolism" to the five periods now accepted should increase. But even if a different term should be victorious (though none I can think of seems to me even remotely preferable), we should always recognize that such a term has fulfilled its function as a tool of historiography if it has made us think not only about individual works and authors but about schools, trends and movements and their international expansion. Symbolism is at least a literary term which will help us to counteract the dependence of much literary history on periodization derived from political and social history (such as the term "Imperialism" used in Marxist literary histories which is perfectly meaningless applied to poetry at that time). Symbolism is a term (and I am quoting the words I applied to

Baroque in 1945) "which prepares for synthesis, draws our minds away from the mere accumulation of observations and facts, and paves the way for a future history of literature as a fine art."85

YALE UNIVERSITY

83 Quoted by Harry Levin, James Joyce (Norfolk, Conn., 1941), p. 19: "A la fois realiste et symboliste."

84 See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York, 1959), pp. 329-30. The lectures in 1912 were called "Verismo ed idealismo nella letteratura inglese."

85 See my Concepts of Criticism, p. 114.


Documents

Wellek Symbolism